Irreligion

Irreligion can be defined only in terms of religion. It encompasses a range of attitudes toward religion that include hostility toward a specific religion or some aspect of that religion, hostility toward all religions, and indifference toward religion. Attitudes dictate action, and irreligionists’ actions may include affiliation with irreligious organizations, active promulgation of hostility toward religion, or private rejection of religious beliefs. Terms such as atheism, agnosticism, and secularism are sometimes popularly used as synonyms for irreligion. Atheism is a-theism, without a belief in gods; agnosticism refers to a belief that one cannot know if there is a god; and secularism centers on the demand for a strict separation of religion and government. Irreligion is a broader term that may include those who subscribe to these beliefs and others. Although any religion may evoke an irreligious response, in Europe and North America, Christianity historically has been the religion rejected by irreligionists.

Brief History

The term irreligion was first used in the late sixteenth century at a time when the Protestant Reformation and individual skeptics had weakened the dominance of medieval scholasticism. Intellectuals throughout Europe questioned established beliefs, even if they sometimes did so in such terms that both adherents to traditional Christianity and the irreligious of later generations would claim them as ancestors. In an age when those convicted of heresy were tortured and burned at the stake, caution was wise. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) saw man as a violent, godless creature driven by self-interest and requiring the control of an absolute government. Pierre Bayle (1647–1704) remained nominally a Protestant and defended religious faith in his widely read, encyclopedic work The Historical and Critical Dictionary even as he subverted Christian doctrine. So skilled was Bayle in presenting both orthodox and irreligious views that modern scholars refer to the "Bayle enigma" and leave open the question of whether the weight of sincerity should go to his defenses of religious faith or his attacks on theology.

In the eighteenth century, Voltaire (1694–1778) directly criticized the Bible and the Roman Catholic Church. His influence reached beyond his own age; his voluminous writings led free thinkers of the next century to hail him as a most able prophet of irreligion. Arguably, the most influential irreligionist of the eighteenth century was Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume (1711–1776), who wrote to expose the errors of orthodox religious beliefs. In the nineteenth century, discoveries by geologists challenged literal interpretations of Genesis, and Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) cast doubt on the biblical account of creation. Social evolutionists contradicted the very notion of "sin," Higher Criticism questioned the historical accuracy of biblical text, Karl Marx (1818–1883) claimed religion was a drug for the masses, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) announced the death of God. The cumulative effect of these ideas was to create a climate that encouraged both Protestant and irreligious zeal.

The evangelical movement in England and the United States with its emphasis on the individual’s personal relationship with Christ was winning converts, founding missionary societies, and advocating social reforms. Irreligious movements of the period can be described in almost the same terms. Secularism, positivism, and ethical culturism were all founded during this period. George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906), the last person England convicted for blasphemy, coined the term "secularism" in 1851. Building on the anti-clerical, anti-theological, and anti-Christian ideas of Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and the utopian socialism of Robert Owen, Holyoke founded the secularist movement. Eventually, his willingness to work with religious believers in the cause of social reforms led to Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891), atheist and activist, taking over the leadership of the movement. It was Bradlaugh who founded the National Secular Society in 1866. In America, the witty and eloquent Robert Green Ingersoll, the son of a Congregational minister, also championed the ideas of Thomas Paine and drew large crowds to his lectures questioning the fundamental tenets of Christianity.

The positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) also found followers and, perhaps more importantly, his ideas influenced other intellectuals such as political economist John Stuart Mill. Based on empiricism, positivism argued for the development of human culture through three stages: theological (reliance on the supernatural), metaphysical (attribution to abstract but incomprehensible causes), and positive (understanding of scientific laws). Felix Adler founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York in 1876. The society, which eventually had branches in Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, strove to separate ethical and moral standards from the trappings of religious beliefs. By the early twentieth century, an international society existed with members in more than a dozen countries.

Irreligion Today

By the twentieth century, most of the nineteenth-century irreligious movements had disappeared or morphed into other groups. Humanism became the dominant movement of the new century. The "Humanist Manifesto" in 1933 attacked orthodox theology forcefully, proclaiming that its doctrines were insignificant and powerless to effect solutions for contemporary problems. Most Christians viewed the movement as the most visible enemy of religion, a view that carried over to the twenty-first century even as humanism particularly and irreligion generally became more widely accepted among the larger population.

A Pew Research study reported in 2015 that, worldwide, the number of religiously unaffiliated people reached 1.1 billion in 2010 and predicted it would reach more than 1.2 billion by 2040. Political scientists David Campbell and Robert Putnam argued that, in the United States, the increase was most dramatic among younger people. They attributed the rise in the number of religiously unaffiliated young people, which they estimated to be as high as one-third of the population, to a reaction to the religious Right in American politics. A question that remains unanswered concerning those who have rejected churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship, regardless of age, is whether they qualify as irreligious or have left organized religion while retaining essentially unchanged religious beliefs.

At the same time, the twenty-first century saw the development of the New Atheism, an irreligious movement with a clear anti-religion agenda spearheaded by authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. Religions other than Christianity inspire irreligious action as well, as exemplified by Salman Rushdie, a self-proclaimed irreligionist whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, was viewed by many Muslims as blasphemous. It prompted Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The French weekly Charlie Hebdo’s satirical cartoons of Islam in 2015 enraged extremists who launched an attack that left twelve people dead, affirming that even in a secular society, some cannot tolerate irreligion.

The percentage of religiously unaffiliated people remained much higher throughout the 2010s and 2020s than in the late twentieth century. An early 2020s Gallup International research project found that one-fourth of respondents reported no religious affiliation and 10 percent of respondents reported atheist beliefs. However, concentrations of beliefs vary by region and some countries are more religious than others. For example, in 2020, the Association of Religion Data Archives reported that the percentage of Mexico's population that reported being non-religious was around 3 percent, compared to around 20 percent in the US and 62 percent in Estonia.

Bibliography

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Bilgrami, Akeel. "Secularism: Its Content and Context." Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 1, 2014, pp. 25–48, doi:10.1111/josp.12048. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.

Campbell, Colin. Toward a Sociology of Irreligion. Revised ed., WritersPrintShop, 2013.

Davie, Grace. "Belief and Unbelief: Two Sides of a Coin." Ecclesiastical Law Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, doi:10.30664/ar.67487. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.

"The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050." Pew Research Center, 2 Apr. 2015, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.

Lee, Lois. Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular. Oxford UP, 2015.

Lewis, James R. "Education, Irreligion, and Non-Religion: Evidence from Select Anglophone Census Data." Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 30, no. 2, 2015, pp. 265–72, doi:10.1080/13537903.2015.1025556. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.

"More Prone to Believe in God than Identify as Religious. More Likely to Believe in Heaven than in Hell." Gallup, 12 Apr. 2023, www.gallup-international.com/survey-results-and-news/survey-result/more-prone-to-believe-in-god-than-identify-as-religious-more-likely-to-believe-in-heaven-than-in-hell. Accessed 15 Jan. 2025.

Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Simon & Schuster, 2010.